ASP.NET Core, John McEnroe and the Mirror of my Office

At Wimbledon 1981, during his first round match against Tom Gullikson, John McEnroe had a chance to pronounce those (in)famous words: “You cannot be serious, man”. As a long-time tennis fan, those words remained printed in my mind. More than the wording itself, though, I remember the tone of speaking—blunt speaking.

I didn’t spend much time on ASP.NET vNext until it was really close to RC. To be honest, at this time moving away from battle-tested and mature ASP.NET MVC 5 is neither crucial nor critical for my everyday real-world development business. But, of course, any new thing is crucial and critical for a “guru” who gets exposure and gigs out of experimenting and speaking about new things. Imagine then when such a huge new thing like ASP.NET vNext comes out.

Anyway, I took it very lightheartedly until the final beta and then RC1. And when I looked at it—and the documentation—in front of the mirror, locked in the toilet of my office, me and me alone, I recalled those (in)famous that John McEnroe pronounced on the Centre Court of Wimbledon in the spring of 1981.

You cannot be serious, man.

I didn’t tell this anybody. I took it as my knee-jerk reaction to something that—no matter the announced stage (RC === release candidate) –I felt to be a great piece of work. Just in progress, though.

“It’s you, Dino—I said—YOU cannot be serious if you think so.”

But then it came the rename of tools, the rename of the entire framework, the RC2 announced and postponed. And you probably know the ongoing facts much better than me.

As I see things, ASP.NET Core was born to be a smaller thing than it is envisioned now. So it is now being repositioned, probably redesigned in some way and put in some sort of a different perspective. In the end, it will probably be the great piece of software it was supposed to be. But—as it was said at some point—it will take the time it takes.

This is a great lesson for anybody in software. Certain things must take their time to become serious things.